


i need a friend (but i'm a vampire smile, you'll meet a sticky end)

by Ehwell



Series: i want a scar that looks just like you [1]
Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I wrote this because I really dislike Ellie and I wanted to flesh out her character more, Other, so i wanted to make her more sympathetic bc I think she has potential, the captain here is vague af outside of being good aligned so feel free to project, the ellie/captain is pretty ambiguous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24852964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ehwell/pseuds/Ehwell
Summary: Maybe it was the smell of Rapt that seems to perpetually cling to everything it touches no matter how much you scrub at your skin and wash and re-wash your clothes or the sulfur-sweats as your body revolts against your third straight night camping in the muggy heat of Monarch’s constantly blustering winds—which, as Nyoka commented, never seem to get tired of blowing shit onto us—or, as Ellie knew in the back of her head despite her reluctance to admit it even to herself, the miserable humidity and stench of Monarch were only a minutiae in all the shit that had piled up on the Captain.Ellie takes things too far, regrets it, and reflects on how shortsighted her worldview is during her time with the Captain.
Relationships: Ellie Fenhill/The Captain (One-sided), The Captain & Ellie Fenhill, or is it - Relationship
Series: i want a scar that looks just like you [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1797973
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	i need a friend (but i'm a vampire smile, you'll meet a sticky end)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Vampire Smile by Kyla La Grange which incidentally you should go listen to because its very Ellie.
> 
> slight tw for discussion of prions and suicide, as well as brief mentions of vomit and violence

When the Captain finally looks up at Ellie, meets her gaze with that steady piercing stare that always seems to make folks in Byzantium squirm, Ellie is hit with the realization that she's tremendously fucked up. 

Sure, the Captain had always tolerated her presence, all of Ellie's offhand commentary about the dog-eat-dog reality of life in Halcyon met with a bemused if somewhat exasperated patience as they calmly explained to her the merits of compassion (which Ellie would call naivety and the sort of ignorance that gets you killed), though Ellie's input as a member of the Unreliable's crew was noted (even if they did call Ellie's advice dismissive cynicism). But this time was different. 

Maybe it was the smell of Rapt that seems to perpetually cling to everything it touches no matter how much you scrub at your skin or wash and re-wash your clothes or the sulfur-sweats as your body revolts to your third straight night camping in the muggy heat of Monarch constantly blustering winds—which, as Nyoka commented, never get tired of blowing shit onto us, I guess—or, as Ellie knew in the back of her head despite her reluctance to admit it even to herself, the miserable humidity and stench of Monarch were only a minutiae in all the shit that had piled up on the Captain. 

It had been a long week, for sure. First, holding their tongue as they played nice with Catherine and her goons. Max, who the Captain had been so damn sure was finally turning over a new leaf, lying and throwing all that trust back in their face to settle some petty grudge from years ago. That family of cannibals being the first “friendly” people they'd met in days. 

Ellie had been quick to jump on that one, and looking at the Captain's stormy expression now, she maybe even regretted it a little. After the deed was done the family sent to reckon with whatever saw fit to see their existence in the universe if you asked Max, or just shitting themselves, then fuckin' rigor mortis, bloating, and the like as decomp set in if you asked Ellie, she found herself peering over the Captain’s shoulder to figure out what they were staring at so intently. 

They stood, hunched over the desk in the son’s room, squinting as they tried to decipher the boy’s chicken scratch as the steady decline of his handwriting and poetry to what he called “the hunger”—an eerie echo of his decompensation as as his central nervous system was eaten away. Reading on until the entries were damn near incomprehensible and then eventually trailed off entirely was bone chilling, like watching in real time as he lost himself, made worse by the image of him still facedown in his blood downstairs burned into the backs of their eyes. 

Gives the term “dog eat dog” new meaning, or proves its applicability with humans, Ellie mused. But wasn’t everyone starving? Did he even know what he was eating? The room was hidden away behind a locked door in the parent’s third floor bedroom, but surely he’d heard the screaming. She scoffed. Prions—nasty fuckers, to be sure, but the sorta shit you bring on yourself by being a cannibal. 

Ellie nudged them with her shoulder, smirking, "Your eating brains eating your brains. How's that for poetry, Cap?" 

Usually dumb jokes, the kind that went over the others' heads, got some kind of a wry smile or half chuckle and eye-roll from the Captain—an odd sort of intimacy that Ellie half-longed for but didn’t quite know how to find in both having been taught just how precarious your own biology is. When they didn't look up, she pressed further. 

"Get it, Cap? Prions, Kuru specifically'd explain the decompensation, even his handwriting gets shakier, probably tremors, which you get from—"

They cut her off, an edge in their voice, "Usually eating human brain. I know, Ellie." 

Behind them, Felix made an odd noise in the back of his throat, sort of a cross between a half strangled groan and a whimper and promptly turned on his heel and rushed into the hall where they could hear him retching. 

"Oh c'mon, Felix," Ellie called after him, then back towards the Captain, loud enough to be sure Felix could still hear, "He's just got a weak stomach, not like us, Cap. Or, no, puking your guts out at every sign of fucked up shit you see in our line of work just means you're damn green. Green in more than one way, that is." 

Looking back towards the Captain, she shot them a pleased smile, only to be met with a blank stare. Their lips pressed in a hard line, their jaw set just slightly forward the way they only did when they were getting frustrated with the endless bureaucratic bullshit of the Board, they just looked at her a moment before turning away and making a beeline for Felix. Following behind, she rolled her eyes at them for not being able to take a joke. 

Felix, seemingly having voided the contents of his stomach into a container outside, wiping a bit of purple—fuckin' Rizzos and their fuckin’ Purpleberry bullshit in their trail rations he loved so much, she should have known—from the corner of his mouth as the Captain sympathetically patted him on the back. 

They spoke softly to him, sounded like maybe apologizing to him—whether for bringing him out here to this shit hole or for what Ellie had said—and their arm around his shoulders, gently steering him down the stairs and out of the house, careful to give as wide a berth around the bodies as the cramped kitchen of the pop-up frontier house would allow. 

Ellie followed them outside, sighing loudly as she trailed behind them, fiddling with the slide of her pistol as Felix drank small sips of water from their canteen like the Captain instructed. Out here in the stark daylight, Ellie realized she'd been right after all: he looks positively green, it hadn't just been the greyish light filtered through shitty Spacer’s Choice faux windows. 

She sighed louder, not wanting to stay in this place a second longer than necessary and kicked her toe against the packed dirt impatiently. But Felix really did look bad. 

Trying to lighten the mood, or maybe just uncomfortable with the encroaching intimacy of extended periods of silence Ellie tries to crack another joke. 

“At least you didn’t stay for dinner like you wanted to, huh Felix?”

It doesn’t land. 

Felix drops heavily onto the stoop and puts his head in his hands. The Captain crouches beside him, rubbing comforting circles on his back which he probably can’t even feel through his armor, and shoots her another warning look, which Ellie ignores.

The Captain turns their attention back to Felix, gently assures him, “It's alright, take all the time you need.”

“Yeah, great, sure!” Ellie snaps, "Take all the time you need! Even though we’re in the middle of a highly dangerous stretch of road populated by highly armed marauders and all manner of bloodthirsty beasts who’d like nothing more than to shoot us or eat us or shoot us then eat us. Certainly, let's make sure Felix isn’t going to cry and shit himself before we all get eaten.”

And she doesn’t really mean it, doesn’t really want to hurt Felix, but something hot and clawed roils in her chest when she sees the Captain treating Felix with the kind of gentle kindness she thought only existed in aetherwave serials right before the tragic hero divulges their backstory to the love interest—the kind of tenderness that comes from putting someone else's needs before your own. Whether it's jealousy or proof she’s genuinely just as much of a soulless bitch as she’s often been accused of being, Ellie isn’t sure she wants to know, but she knows she wants it to stop. So she cracks another not-really joke. 

“What’s it matter, anyway, Felix? You’ve seen how the Cysty Pig factory is run. I’ve heard that’s one of the better one. Surely a lil human has slipped in there once or twice, and you’d be none the wiser. What are the odds, Cap, that Felix has already eaten a human, like eighty to one? Hell, with all the people who disappear in Halcyon, it could even be someone you knew like the Mathers did, what does it matter? They’re gone anyway, how they went, or where, just take your parents—” 

The Captain cuts her off, nearly barking, “Enough, Ellie!” as Felix doubles over again and starts gagging, promptly spitting up all the water he’d just drank. That was one Ellie knew she’d fucked up.

She wanted to protest, to exclaim it was stupid to just sit here like— what was the expression the Captain had used— sitting ducks, while Felix contemplated the morality of cannibalism. But the look the Captain was currently giving her shut her right up. 

It wasn’t about that, and they both knew it. The way the Captain’s eyes rested on her, gave her their undivided attention, always made her feel as though they could see everything happening inside her. They both knew this wasn’t about Rapts, or cannibalism, or Felix’s weak stomach. It was about Ellie’s hackles inadvertently raising every damn time she watched people give and receive such gentle affection and kindness so easily— especially the Captain. Half uncomfortable watching the scene unfold, half wishing that were her under the Captain’s watchful gaze instead of Felix, Ellie was acutely aware love had always and will always be the one thing capable of ripping her apart from the inside. 

Sure she talked a big game about how stupid it was to take care of anyone but yourself, but watching it happen, actually seeing how easily the Captain cared was something else. Ellie had always staunchly argued that when pushes comes to shove, humans are selfish and only care about getting what’s theirs— the kind of love in aetherwave serials, that supersedes fight or flight response, lets you sit completely out in the open because your friend needs a moment on the most dangerous fuckin' planet in all of Halcyon when you've got the Board and Phineas and Sublight, and the weight of everyone still sitting entombed in the Hope breathing down your neck— caring for someone that much, Ellie hadn’t thought possible. 

But the Captain was slowly making her question what she thought was human nature as they continued on like this, day-in and day-out, and frankly Ellie had no idea how to cope with it. The Captain was throwing themselves into this mission, of saving the hope, and for what? Not bits or glory or anything in particular. Just because they thought it was the right thing to do. Somehow Phineas had managed to pluck out the one asshole on the ship who cared as much—as stupidly, as recklessly, as Lawdamn near suicidally—as the Captain. 

That kind of caring that Ellie would have bet every bit she'd ever had didn't actually exist anywhere in Halcyon, nor back on Earth, or in any other system in the cosmos. But seeing it, here, now, and every other time the Captain agreed to do some stupid task like finding some fuckin' lost kid or shlepping around Halcyon to ensure some kid they'd picked up on some backwater hamlet on Terra 2 got to have the most infernally detailed date she'd dreamed of or fighting a Law-forsaken insect abomination just because some person they'd met less than a day ago in a bar asked them to, the kind of things that they did no matter how dangerous or thankless or what the odds were without asking for payment—some part of her brain knew that meant her theory of humanity was wrong. 

After all, the Captain continued to prove it wrong day in and day out and while the Captain may be an outlier, somewhere even deeper in the recesses of her mind, no matter how hard she tried to push down the thought, a little voice persistently needled her. Parvati and the scientists who experimented on themselves "for the greater good" and even people like Zora Blackwood and Nyoka proved you can love something or someone or just have enough of whatever thing it is that drives someone to be as unrelentingly good as the Captain to do things that aren't aimed first and foremost at looking for yourself. 

And if that's true, that all these people, just a tiny portion of those living in just this system, were capable of acting for the good of others over themselves, had some driving force that—Love. That's what it was—No need to mince her words—if these people who Ellie had known such a short time were so readily and freely willing to love something to their own demise, then, maybe, not only was the whole theory of inherent human selfishness in all cases in perpetuity flawed, but maybe she'd spent so long so sure of this as an unquestionable truth because she'd simply never experienced that kind of love herself. 

Something she'd heard Max say to the Captain, late one night when she should have been asleep and instead she listened as they spoke in hushed tones about what was lost and what might still be found as the Captain continued to take that slow walk through hell on the off chance things could be better. It had gone quiet for a second, the Captain trailed off as they wondered aloud if they were damning everyone they had loved and left behind on the Hope as they repeatedly put themselves in harm's way in the name of some nebulous good of which Phineas preached. 

If maybe they were just suicidal, endlessly selfish, unable to cope with the burden thrust on their shoulders, that maybe, if they really loved the people they had left behind on the hope, if it wouldn't be kinder to let them remain there in peace rather than risking their own life and those of everyone they'd left behind and everyone with whom they walked on with for a goal that may simply be unreachable. 

Max had broken the moment's silence to say, "there is no greater love than this: the willingness to lay down one's life for one's friends". 

Some quote, Ellie was sure, from some old neologism from some long dead text, just another clichéd anecdote for those unable to confront the reality of life as she did. And yet it struck something within her. Deep inside in a place she didn't like to admit existed at all where she kept the child she had been who her parents had raised as more accessory or investment than daughter who had constantly strived for perfection because maybe that would earn her parent's love.

Ironic really, that her parents were instead willing to lay down her life for appearances—her parents who'd raised her, influenced everything she was now even if she'd never admit it, who were supposed to be the people who are guaranteed to love you no matter what. Even old clichés, the sort of thing she'd hear from patients as they requested higher cheekbones and a softer jawline: "I have a face only a mother could love!" 

But Ellie's mother never had. Her Father either. Not like how they were supposed to, anyhow. She'd never realized it, truthfully, until listening to Parvati and Max, both a little tipsy on Felix’s concoction of Purpleberry Bunches and Spectrum Vodka, reminisce about their parents growing up. 

She'd felt a pang of something, deep in her chest, like want but less burning—more like waking up from an excision to find something which was supposed to be there no longer is—an echoing empty, as she quietly stole away from where she'd been listening in the doorway of her quarters and into Parvati's. There, she glanced at the inscription below the wrench labeled “Abigail: First wrench dad ever gave me. She's been a friend ever since” hung on the wall to the faded picture of Parvati's father lovingly framed on the desk. 

As she picked it up, Ellie noticed the grease fingerprints which blotted every inch of the frame as well as a few on the edges of the glass as if Parvati had picked it up regularly to stare at his smiling face as she worked. For a moment, she tried to imagine what it was like being Parvati—or at least that this man was her father—had loved her, carried her around on his shoulders, taught her how to fix and make new, how to talk to women and how to clean a scraped knee. 

Parvati's voice floated in from the kitchen, always one to slowly get louder the more she drank on the rare occasions she did, she told the Vicar, "you wouldn't remember 'im, my dad, but he worked himself into an early grave, I reckon, sometimes, ya know, maybe he wouldn'ta done that, if it hadn'ta been for me, ya know?" 

Ellie set down the picture frame and tried to casually stroll out of her room like she hadn't been fingering the frame of Parvati's most prized possession, like she wasn't listening intently to Parvati and the Vicar's conversation but Max's eyes flitted up to her as she sidled up to the fridge. 

"He clearly loved you, Parvati. He wanted to do what was best for you, certainly, but it's not your fault for existing," Nyoka chimed in.

Ellie hadn't even noticed her leaned against the counter, slipping a bottle if something, eyes slightly unfocused but still shining bright as ever. Felix too, and the Captain, she realized, all were sitting at the table, drinks in hand, as Felix stared at Parvati as if he was drinking in her words.

He urged her on, asking, "Parvati, tell us about the bedtime stories again. What he used to read to you?"

"Oh Law, we only had the one kids book, see, called uh, the Little, uh Little Engine, sounds right but he'd read to me from his mechanics books until I fell asleep even if he just got off a day-long shift. He'd barely keep his eyes open but he'd say he loved me 'till the stars went out. 'Till Saltuna grew on trees. 'Till..." 

She trailed off, seemingly lost in memory, a dopey smile splayed across her lips, which Felix mirrored back to her, as if drunk on the memory of what he'd never had. 

"Forever. He said he'd love you 'till forever and beyond," Felix finished Parvati's sentence with a soft sort of reverence, as if he was afraid to shatter the moment and lose it forever. 

"I want...I want love like that, a family like that, someday," he breathed, almost too quiet for Ellie to hear across the room where she stood frozen, transfixed by the scene playing out in front of her. 

And Ellie looked at the Captain, who'd been silent and remained so but what they were thinking was painted all over their face. There was something about the Captain, for all their impassiveness, the seemingly blank expression they carefully schooled their features into as if to block out anyone with prying eyes from being able to glean any insight into whatever they were thinking at any given moment away from them, the longer she knew them, the more nearly imperceptible microexpressions Ellie could detect flickering across what she'd once thought to be an impenetrable veneer. 

These days, she could read the Captain like a book, so Ellie didn't need Nyoka to say what the Captain was thinking, but she did anyway. 

Over her drink, Nyoka shot him a soft smile, and without a trace of insincerity said, "Y'know Felix, it seems like you've already got it right here." 

Ellie had left after that. As fast as she could without drawing too much attention to herself. Too much unfiltered honesty, caring, whatever you wanted to call it—feelings without the refraction of sarcasm deniability had always made her uneasy, like gnawing saccharine of Purpleberry Bunch that always made her teeth ache. 

But even if Ellie had never known it herself, clearly the kind of love that makes people act without regard to their own wellbeing existed. It existed and maybe she only kept repeating to anyone who'd listen that it didn't, that humans are selfish and it's every person for themselves alone and floating in the aether because she was trying to convince herself because if love like that, selfless, self-sacrificing truly didn't exist, then no fault could be placed on Ellie's shoulders. If love like that did exist, Ellie had to wonder then, if maybe she simply wasn't deserving of it. 

Maybe that was why her parents had never cared, no matter how much she'd wanted them to. They hadn't even missed her when she was gone. 

Truthfully, she couldn't think of anyone who would. 

Even the crew of the Unreliable, most of whom she got on with okay for the most part, were at arm's distance or greater, and had, among themselves, the eight of them, even fucking ADA and SAM, who by all scientific accounts should not have been capable of love, well, they all loved eachother. 

She could see it in the casual touches, the Captain ruffling Felix's hair or Nyoka readjusting Parvati's stance as she taught her how to use a gun or even Max cheerfully greeting ADA every time he set foot in the bridge and the two talked about theories of morality and shared anecdotes about the Captain's latest forays into the Halcyon system. 

Sure, Felix hung on her every word when she told the embellished versions of stories that were only half true to begin with, and Parvati offered to fix her weapon for nothing in return, and she and Nyoka had shared more than a few good laughs and drinks, Ellie felt as though she was behind a window of bulletproof plexiglass that she had to shout to be heard through—and more often than not, people only heard what she said, and didn't seem to hear what she meant. 

If anything, wasn't that just further proof that it wasn't that the kind of love that overcomes our nature didn't exist, but rather everyone she encountered knew the truth about her that Ellie had long tried to ignore: she simply wasn't lovable, didn't deserve it, was incapable of giving or receiving it because of who she fundamentally is. 

And the look the Captain was giving her right now—their eyes a sort of writhing mass of emotions, their expression shifting as they seethed from pity to anger to outrage to disgust to—to something Ellie recognized but would rather not name. 

She'd seen it on her parents' faces when she'd dragged the Captain to see them in Byzantium—christ, she'd really insulted them repeatedly, called them riff raff, asked them to show off all the ripped corners and sharp edges and scars that had been made in the process of surviving their life thus far, all of which they'd trusted her enough to let her see, and they hadn't looked at her like this, even though she probably deserved it then, just as she did now. 

That expression, the moment after reaching the tension point, like a guitar string snapping, sounds like a heart breaking—whether Ellie's or the Captain's, she wasn't sure, but the moment, whatever the sort of limbo that allowed Ellie to remain on the Unreliable's crew whom she'd come to realize were just fundamentally better people than her, was shattered. 

That expression, the amalgam of hope for her, that she could become what she was not currently, Ellie was all too familiar with. Call it betrayal, call it heartilation, call it exhaustion, call it defeat—a thousand names for the same beast, that comes in roaring like a Rapt and leaves timid as a sprat—the Captain had finally given up on her. Yelling, anger, a verbal dressing down like the kind she'd only seen the Captain deliver once in all the time she'd known them, that was hard to stomach but even rage requires care. 

This—this cold, detached apathy was a thousand times worse. Disappointment requires hope, and hope, though a dangerous thing—pity and forgiveness with teeth, call it hemophilia—hope will let you bleed and bleed and bleed but in that moment, Ellie finds herself wondering if she's just a Lawdamn leech. 

Like maybe she tries to convince herself that everyone is content to feast on the blood of other, other people's hope, when really it's just people like her. Like she's attached herself to the Captain because how damn much they care, they'll open a vein for anyone who needs it and ask for nothing in return. 

Back when she was a surgeon, Ellie remembered feeling baffled by blood donors who'd take time out of their day, have a needle unceremoniously shoved in their vein to drain them of a little of the lifeforce and ask nothing in return. But for some people, people like the Captain, it's not nothing. The others, the people the Captain had helped at their own expense, a proverbial hero, a blood donor in the pejorative, the crew, they'd more than repaid them in kind. 

Parvati keeps the ship, all the equipment on which their lives depend, functioning, the Vicar listens quietly to the others' gnawing doubts in the stillness of the dead of night, Nyoka props the crew up with surprisingly wise advice and pretends not to notice that Felix sneaks into her quarters to secret away the bottles of Spectrum Vodka she hides in the hollow area at the base of her bunk in the dead of the night for the sake of her liver. 

They all do it without expecting anything in return, because the Captain gave them that chance. That bullshit blood drive poster, "donate life", surely metaphoric overkill in its applicability in hindsight but wasn't that what the Captain had done? A little foray away from their own desires that'd they'd all paid back in full, without the Captain having to ask. 

Except Ellie. 

Sure, Ellie would do almost anything they asked—as much as she didn't want to admit it, she owed them. But maybe that was the difference. Ellie, a blood sucker, taking advantage of someone genuinely good and justifying it to herself because if the Captain wanted to open a vein and hand out transfusions, she did what anyone else would do and drank her fill. 

Not anyone else—just anyone else like her. 

And yet, the Captain seemed to trust her. 

Sometimes, in the quiet of the early hours of the morning or the latest hours of the night, Ellie would wonder if maybe someone like the Captain could ever fall in love with someone like her. She was charming, in a roguish sort of way, and smart, and pretty when she wanted to be, and a helluva crackshot. 

There had been moments, usually while keeping watch when they'd talked, really talked, over the embers of a dying campfire late at night. They had a game, she didn't remember when it'd been invented, not really, where she'd pose a word, something obscure from the recesses of her memories of medical school and try to stump the Captain. 

"Apoptosis."

Without missing a beat, the Captain replied, "pre-programmed cell death," then paused for several moments, so long that Ellie nearly spoke again, wanting to capture the moment, the image of the Captain, there, staring into the faintly burning ashes between them, face bathed in that eerie glow, the last flickering embers reflected in their eyes. 

For once, Ellie had nothing to say, just realizing that she did in fact care about the Captain in a way she did not care to put a name too, to risk giving it that kind of power, it might consume her.  
But all the same, Ellie had never been good at keeping her thoughts inside her head, much less this sudden and all-consuming realization—the kind that shifts things she'd been so certain of, like the planets in their orbits, out of rotation. 

Luckily, the Captain hadn't looked up from where they were staring, hadn't noticed the catastrophic shift in Ellie's reality, finally continued, "Means your body, like my body, is suicidal on a cellular level." 

"What..?" 

Endlessly patient, even tone, as if stating the weather, not a second sort of ground breaking revelation so soon after the first, the Captain repeated, still gazing unblinking into the now burnt out fire pit, "Apoptosis."

Ellie paused for a moment, wished she'd paid attention at all to those units on bedside manner, she'd never known how to tread lightly, frankly had never cared to before this moment. 

She finally settled on, in the same even tone, a question asking them to trust her in it's gentle ambiguity, Ellie asked, softly, "Have you ever thought about it?"

"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it—don't think about it—every few months like clockwork when I run out of sleeping pills," they laugh, a chilling sound, half-wry and half-hollow. "After all, I am my father's child." 

A hush falls in the valley, even the distant cries of Rapts, the generators of Monarch's scattered towns, the gentle lapping of sulfur pools as the wind hollows up and over the peaks and hollows of the mountain seem to fade, or maybe Ellie had simply stopped listening. 

"You've never mentioned him before."

"Reckon I won't again. He, well— he tried."

"Tried to...?"

"Make it seem like it'd all be okay. Always said all the wrong things to comfort me. Told me no one who's worth anything is happy, that those who history remembers for their greatness are destined to suffer, or maybe it was that there's no brilliance without pain, I don't remember now. He'd name artists, brilliant people, artists, writers, poets who'd lead short and miserable, but prolific, existences and say see, it's not in vain after all." 

"....I'm sorry." 

"No, no, don’t be, I’m sorry, I get like this late at night sometimes. I know you don't do personal."

"No! No, it's alright, if you uh, need to talk, you can." 

Another lapse into silence, this time Ellie continued, "Do you remember when you asked me what I would've said to my parents when they kicked us out of their house in Byzantium?" 

They nodded, still not looking up at her, just staring, thousands of kilometers away.

Ellie continued, "How they should've listened to me?"

They nodded again, "You should not have been treated the way you were treated."

Ellie felt a lump swell in her throat, and swallowed hard. 

"I. Yeah, just curious if you rehearsed it like I did, a thousand times in your head, what you'd say. How you'd say it. To him. Your father, I mean."

"I'd just look at him, straight in the eyes and say, 'Baba, I am tired of pulling out poetry instead of shrapnel. Tired of holding my heart like a wounded animal, instructing it out to bleed. Tired of bleeding in front of people." 

The memory fades and Ellie remembered where she was, staring into the Captain's face, watching as they'd finally given up on her. And so she waited. 

For what, she wasn’t sure. A command, telling her to pack her things maybe, a recognition of her as all vampire smile and bloody mouth and endless expanse of nothingness and unquenchable desire to be something that threatens to swallow up anyone who dares look inside. 

For once, she was laid bare, the Captain seeing her for what she always has been, no tricks of light, no smoke and mirrors and snappy retort. 

Surely, this is where this grand adventure—like something out of a dream— this is where it ends. Where they kick her to the curb once and for all because they would all be happier without her. Because they’d probably be right. Ellie braced for impact, for them to tell her to head back to the ship and then head on her way, for this thing she’d never properly appreciated in the first place to end once and for all.

But then it didn’t.

The Captain’s expression shifted back to their usual imperceptible mask and they heaved an exasperated sigh, and just looked at her. When they finally spoke, it felt like a punch in the gut, but one Ellie knows she deserved. 

“You know, Ellie,” they said flatly, with no trace of the ire she expected, “for all your blustering about the state of nature, how it's everyone for themselves, how there’s no changing that, no matter what we do, for all your smugness, insisting you exist on a planet all your own, lording above all of us irrational shitheads who care about anything besides ourselves, you just genuinely don’t seem to grasp how you’ve bought into Board brainwashing more than anyone.” 

Felix, now looking markedly less pale, smirked and ducked his head as the Captain turned like they were going to leave. Instead, they paused and looked at Ellie thoughtfully for a moment before continuing, “maybe you’re only so scornful of basic human kindness because you’ve had the luxury of never truly needing to rely on it to survive.”

And Ellie just stared back at them in stunned silence.

“Or maybe, you’re just so used to people treating you like you treat them, you just don’t think you’re deserving of kindness anymore. But I like a challenge, so hell or highwater, I’m going to prove you wrong, Ellie Fenhill.” 

Another beat of silence passed that Ellie felt stretch into one eternity then another before the moment passed and she watched as the pair fell into step as they began to head up the road. Looking back at her, over their shoulder, the Captain called back to her,

“Now are you coming with me or not, Fenhill?”

And of course she was.

**Author's Note:**

> lol this is long as fuck congrats if you got through it. please leave a comment, I live for validation


End file.
